Art up in lights

A 5 p.m. lighting ceremony for the Lights on Market Street installations launches The ARTery Project, a San Francisco Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts initiative aimed at revitalizing the area plagued with vacant storefronts.

“Existing retailers there are really challenged by the lack of pedestrians,” said the Luis Cancel, the commission’s director of cultural affairs. “This is hopefully going to attract people to patronize those stores.”

Each night, Paul Notzold’s installation will feature a different poem by a student in the commission’s WritersCorps program.

Then members of the Bayanihan Community Center and Kularts will lead a procession to 10 United Nations Plaza, which will feature Paul Notzold’s animated cartoon of two walking legs surrounded by speech bubbles. A different poem by students in the commission’s WritersCorps program will appear in the bubble each night.

The procession will end at 1017 Market St., where Theo Watson’s installation with a “capture station” will transform images of passersby into graphic-style portraits.

Since the three installations, budgeted at $150,000, will stay up for six months, they’ve been designed to evolve, Cancel said.

“If you’ve seen it once you haven’t seen it forever again,” he said.

Beside their growing popularity across the nation, light installations harken back to a Market Street in the 1940s and 1950s.

“There were many marquis and illuminations used along (the street),” Cancel said. “It was the equivalent of Broadway.”